We, the representatives of progressive political parties from the Mediterranean region, gathered in Tunis from March 23 to 24, 2013, at the call of the Popular Front, and adopted the following resolution.

At least 54 countries including Syria, Iran, Sweden, Iceland, and UK offered CIA “covert support” to detain, transport, interrogate and torture suspects in the years following the 9/11 attacks, according to a new report. Continue reading this...

The Friends of Syria nations that support regime change meet in Morocco on Wednesday for the first time since the creation of a new opposition coalition seeking wider international recognition. Voice of Russia spoke to the Director of the Damascus Research Centre Bassam Abu Abdullah about this upcoming event. He called this meeting the meeting of Syria’s enemies and not friends.

Marking abandonment of the last shred of pretense of observing the rule of law, the Nobel Peace Prize winning European Union Foreign Ministers are to meet with the leader of the Syrian insurgency in Brussels on Monday 10th December, according to Lebanon’s Daily Star.

On February 4 the UN Security Council (UNSC) held a new session devoted to Syria. This time the targets of the strike were Russia and China. It was done in an open and demonstrative way. The provocative skills become more and more honed. This time around the number of the draft resolution sponsors was not four (like in October 2011) but nineteen. Besides seven Security Council members (the USA, France, Great Britain, Togo, Portugal, Germany, Colombia) there were twelve more ‘co-authors’: Morocco (the official author of the draft), Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and even Libya. An attempt was made to present the draft as ‘an all Arabs stance.’

In October 2007, the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada have joined the negotiations. Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines) what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting ‘Internet distribution and information technology’.

Morocco, with its 35 million people, where 1 in 3 are unemployed and poverty is widespread, has had multi-party elections since independence in 1956 without anyone taking much notice. Even Western Saharans get a taste of democracy from Rabat, however bitter.

The League of Arab States (Arab League) suspended the membership of Syria in the organization on November 12 as it had with Libya on February 22 of this year. In the case of Libya, whose membership was reinstated after NATO bombed proxy forces into power in late August, reports at the time indicated that member states Algeria and Syria had been opposed to the action but folded under pressure for a consensus from the eight Arab states governed by royal families – Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which to all intents and purposes now are the Arab League, with the other formal members either victims of recent regime change of one sort or another or likely targets for such a fate.